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Category Archives: Exhibitions

New York’s Yiddish Theatre

Museum of the City of New York

Curator Edna Nahshon

In the early decades of the twentieth century, a vibrant theatrical culture took shape on New York City’s Lower East Side. Original dramas, comedies, musicals, and vaudeville, along with sophisticated productions of Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Chekhov, were innovatively staged for crowds that rivaled the audiences on Broadway. Though these productions were in Yiddish and catered to Eastern European, Jewish audiences (the largest immigrant group in the city at the time), their artistic innovations, energetic style, and engagement with politics and the world around them came to influence all facets of the American stage.

Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao’s
New York

Museum of the City of New York

Curator Sean Corcoran

Jeff Liao creates large-scale panoramas by combining multiple exposures of the same location taken over the course of several hours. The resulting composite photographs are often fantastical; complex, hyper-real views that no single shot—or the eye—could capture. Liao has spent the past decade honing his distinctive style, making images of his adopted city from the Grand Concourse to Coney Island, the old Shea Stadium to the 72nd Street Subway.

Alexander Hamilton: Striver, Statesman, Scoundrel

New York Public Library

Curator Kailen Rogers

Although enormously influential in the political and economic development of the United States, Alexander Hamilton was, until recently, a forgotten Founding Father—the one who never became president, the one who did not live to see 50. The supergraphics sampled from the engraving of Hamilton’s face that appears on the ten dollar bill.

Folk City: New York and the Folk Music Revival

Museum of the City of New York

In the 1950s and 1960s, folk music blossomed in New York City, especially in Greenwich Village, where clubs and coffee houses showcased singers like Pete Seeger and Odetta and nurtured a generation of newcomers, including Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, Dave Van Ronk, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Peter, Paul and Mary. The multi-media exhibition Folk City: New York and the Folk Music Revival, featuring original instruments, handwritten lyrics, and video and film footage, traces the roots of the revival, its growth in New York, its major players, and its impact on American politics and culture during the tumultuous 1960s.

New York Public Library

Lincoln and the Jews

New-York Historical Society
Shapell Manuscript Foundation

Through never-before displayed original documents, artifacts, photographs, Lincoln’s own writings, and first person accounts primarily from the Shapell Manuscript Collection, the exhibition will trace events in Lincoln’s life through the lens of his Jewish contemporaries, such as Abraham Jonas, who became Lincoln’s political strategist and “most valued friend,” and Issachar Zacharie, his enigmatic confidant.

City as Canvas:
Graffiti Art from the
Martin Wong Collection

Museum of the City of New York

Curator Sean Corcoran

Martin Wong, an East Village artist and collector of graffiti art, amassed a treasure trove of hundreds of works on paper and canvas—in aerosol, ink, and other mediums. The artists, including Keith Haring, Lee Quiñones, LADY PINK, and FUTURA 2000, were seminal figures in an artistic movement that spawned a worldwide phenomenon, altering music, fashion, and popular visual culture.

The exhibition City as Canvas: Graffiti Art from the Martin Wong Collection includes over 150 works on canvas and other media, along with photographs of graffiti writing long erased from subways and buildings.mcny.org

The ABC of It:
Why Children’s Books Matter

New York Public Library

Curator Leonard Marcus

The ABC of It draws on collections across the Library to present the literature for children and teens against a sweeping backdrop of history, the arts, popular culture, and technological change. The books and related objects on view reveal hidden historical contexts and connections and invite second looks and fresh discoveries. They suggest that books for young people have stories to tell us about ourselves, and are rarely as simple as they seem.nypl.org

Keep Calm and Carry On:
World War II and
the British Home Front,
1938-1951

Norton Museum of Art,
West Palm Beach, Florida

Curator Donald Albrecht

This exhibition explores the impressive gamut of England’s home-front efforts just before, during, and after the war years 1939-1945. While millions of British men and women served in the military overseas, England’s entire creative class mobilized to win the war on the home front. Drawings, posters, photographs, film, furniture, fashion, and more will illustrate how they did so. Included are examples of how

designers created fashions and furnishings to save on essential wartime materials, and injected style and beauty into the harsh realities of wartime life, and how graphic artists and filmmakers produced inspirational work that shaped the nation’s behavior and attitudes, convincing the country, as the era’s most famous slogan urged, to “Keep calm and carry on.” The exhibition is organized into three primary sections: Design for Fashion and Beauty, Design for Shelter and Protection, and Design for Propaganda and Entertainment.norton.org